EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 73, 23 February 1938, Page 2

EUROPE TO-DAY

HOT WEATHER IN NAPLES. Tlie tourist tliinks of Naples as a rare Mediterranean beauty spot, and so it is. But we will .turn aside from the great sights and come (if you will) to the less-known quarter of the city. For the people are worth seeing. There are over 850,000 of them, all loving the brilliant sunshine of this southern town, many of them passing most of their days under the sky rather than under a roof. Gay, impulsive, still with fiery passions (as if Vesuvius were within them instead of above) they are strange folk. And- strangely some of them live. Come among these old and narrow and tortuous streets, some of them far from clean, mere fissures between the tall houses. It is easy to be lost. It is a noisy quarter, nois}' day and night, and at the height of the summer you will find night as bizarre as anything -you have seen. Odd though it may be, the poorer Neapolitans live in tlie streets during what we should call a heat-wave. They forsake their stuffy tenements and come into the street, sleeping there, cooking with little charcoal stoves, washing their babies. It is all odd. You may see the milkman in this maze of alleys. He is calling loudly, and you notice that he is driving a herd of goats before him. This is fresh milk indeed. You come to your door (unless you are living in the street) and the goat is milked before your eyes—straight into your jug. If you live high up in the fourth or fifth storey you do not trouble to come down for the milk—you lower a can by a piece of string and then haul it up again.

Rather droll, surely? Naples, once the home of the poet Virgil, linked with great and stirring events, is for all that a bit of Europe well worth exploring to-day—(G.)